Criminalising forced marriage in the UK: why it will not help women

New proposals to criminalise forced
marriage are due for their penultimate reading in the House of Lords this month.
Amrit Wilson reports on one of the most strongly contested pieces
of legislation relating to gender to go through Parliament in recent years

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Under the umbrella of the Anti-Social
Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill which reached report stage on 8 January,
new proposals criminalising forced marriage are due for their penultimate
reading in the House of Lords in the next few days before becoming law. This is
one of the most strongly contested legislations relating to gender to go
through Parliament in recent years. The government sees it as crucial, not it
seems because it might help the women affected, but because in the words of the Home Secretary,Theresa May,
'by criminalising it we are sending a strong message that it will not be
tolerated'. The majority of groups which make up the Black and minority ethnic
(BME) movement against violence against women in the UK, think the law will
actually deter women from seeking legal redress. They regard it as little other
than an example of the government's hypocrisy, and its cynical use of gender to
intensify repression, criminalisation and Islamophobia.

This is not, the first attempt to bring in a law criminalising
forced marriage. The last time was in 2006. At that time,
the government was mainly interested in the marriages of British national women
to foreign men and while projected as a way of protecting women from violence
the proposed law was clearly about reducing and policing immigration. Today the
government says it is also about identifying and criminalising forced marriages
where both partners are based in Britain.

In 2006, in the face of opposition from women's organisations and
community groups the government had to back down. This time, to avoid this
recurring, after a remarkably short consultation period, the government has
used the cunning
device of counting 48 organisations from across the country as just one,
allowing it to come up with a tally of 54 for the law and 37 against it.

Why is the law being opposed so strongly by BME women's
organisations?

Marai
Larasi, Director of the Black feminist organisation Imkaan which provides advocacy,
research and training to a national network of BME women's refuges and
services, points out that 'successive governments have failed to provide
preventative measures and ensure that the existing safeguarding and legislative
structures are fully utilised to protect girls and women from forced marriage.
Yet now the government is bringing more costly primary legislation, which is
likely to be difficult for women to access. We must ask ourselves: who or what
is this legislation really for?.

Ample legislation already exists to address forced marriage. There
is a Civil Law specifically on forced marriage, a Forced Marriage Protection
Order and a battery of other legislation which can deal with cases of Forced
Marriage - laws on GBH, abduction,
kidnapping and child protection, for example. These are often not implemented,
partly through lack of will and partly because most services which support
women through the legal process have been abolished.

Under the new proposals, not only perpetrators, but vulnerable
members of a family who themselves face coercion are likely to be criminalised.
In addition, breaching the Forced Marriage Protection Order will also be
criminalised, despite the fact that experience in Scotland (which criminalised
such breaches in January 2011) shows that this has led to a dramatic fall in
women seeking legal redress. The Scottish experience also demonstrates
that it can be impossibly difficult to prove coercion in court, and as a result
prosecution in cases of forced marriage in Scotland is going to continue to
rely on existing offences.

Frontline organisations working with women point out that while
over the last decade, support structures for women facing violence have been
removed, the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 has focussed on action against perpetrators, establishing
structures for increased criminalisation, surveillance and racial
profiling. This has made the relationship between the police and BME
communities worse than it already is, and almost everything under the Domestic
Violence Act and the proposed Forced Marriage law is police-led.

As Baljit Banga, director of Newham
Asian Women's Project in London, a long-established organisation which
deals with an average of 1,500 cases a year, says, these women 'want support
but they are absolutely clear that they do not want to go to the police (this
would be the first step for legal action). There are concerns in the way police
intervene... Women have seen male children in their families, their brothers
and sons, harassed. Many of them are aware that if the police are involved
their cases could go to MARAC
- the multi-agency risk assessment conferences which will take things out
of their hands and totally disempower them while prying into every detail of
their lives.' Of the forced marriage
cases supported at NAWP, she says, 'we have not come across a single case where
the young woman has wanted to charge her parents or other family members even
under the present laws. ...The women we see already report to us about being
targeted by police anyway and made to feel as if they are doing something wrong
- in rape cases for example. Fear of a parent being charged has worked as a
hindrance, an obstacle for young women who approach NAWP for support, advice
and information or safe access to accommodation so that they may take
appropriate action'.

In a very different part
of the country, Rotherham in the north east, Zlakha Ahmed, Director of Apna
Haq a Black, South Asian and minority ethnic women's organisation,
tells of a very similar situation. Apna
Haq has supported seven young women facing pressure to marry over the last
year. Not one was willing to charge their parents, even under existing laws.
Criminalising forced marriage is not a solution, she says.

This scenario is replicated across the UK: research by Imkaan based on a
country-wide survey shows that young women in this position want most urgently
to escape and find a safe place where they can rebuild their lives and
confidence. This has been made much harder with the closure and merger of
Black, South Asian and minority ethnic refuges and specialist services -
Imkaan’s (2012) member survey shows
that over a third of services reported significant funding cuts of between
£20,000 and £100,000.

Under these conditions, according to the Ashiana
Network in Waltham Forest,
criminalisation of forced marriage may deter
women also from using civil remedies. In addition, and perhaps even more
seriously, it will intensify a situation where women minimise the abuse they
face when confronted with the prospect of using the law. As the Ministry of
Justice itself noted in a report
on the existing Civil law Forced Marriage Protection Orders: 'Victims did not want to be the
‘instigators’ of legal action as they were frightened that their actions would
be discovered by their families, saying that they felt safe to return, or to
continue residing in the family home.'

But what about the cases where women do want to charge their
parents - what is their experience of the new law likely to be? What is it now
under existing legislation? A briefing
paper from Ashiana Network notes, that 'the risk to women is significantly
increased if they pursue legal redress and our experience is that women do not
receive sufficient protection while going through the criminal justice system.'
The response of the courts and agencies, they note, has been to persuade women
to go into witness protection programmes which involve changing ones name and
identity and moving to a secret
location. This is an extremely isolating and often traumatising experience for
the vulnerable young women involved, leading
many to voluntarily opt out of the programme placing them at even
greater risk.

If a woman decides to withdraw her case altogether, and many do,
she may then, as in rape cases, face being charged with wasting police time or
perjury, both of which are offenses which carry prison sentences. In addition,
in the case of forced marriage, as the government's Forced Marriage Unit says,
rather casually, on page 10 of A Forced
Marriage Survivors handbook, 'there is the chilling possibility that ... if there is overwhelming evidence that it
would be in the public interest to prosecute, the CPS may proceed without
consent' my italics.

Why would it be in the public interest? Is this the new way of
bringing home the same message which was being openly stated by CPS spokespersons
back in 2006 that terrorism, forced marriage, and extremism were all
inextricably linked ? A construction which has no basis whatsoever in
fact. In November 2006, for example, at
a round table discussion organised by Imkaan, Nazir Afzal - then a Director of
the CPS - had told
the meeting about a 'lovely map' on the wall of the Forced Marriage Unit which
identified 'hotspots of radicalism and hotspots of honour-based violence...If
you went in the Special Branch of the Terrorist Unit and looked at their map,
you would see signiﬁcant links, signiﬁcant correlation. So, maybe there is
something about . . . extremism, the way people think around those issues, that
links in with what happens with women in their families too'. There was one
case, he added 'where I could actually evidence it, so how many others are
there . . . I have been talking to ministers for the last few months. I
mentioned radicalism hotspots and the map of honour-based violence hotspots –
then they really listened!'

Since that time the perceived links between forced marriage and
honour crimes and terrorism, extremism and illegal immigration have entered the
realms of 'commonsense'. Now it is enough to talk about 'culture' and everyone
understands the sub-texts.

BME feminists have argued that forced marriage and honour based
violence should not be exoticised. They are forms of violence against women,
and should be dealt with as such. Instead, all violence against BME and
particularly South Asian women is being categorised as forced marriage and honour-based crime. These forms of violence
have become, according to Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters, 'symbolic of all
that is deemed to be wrong with minorities.'

An accompanying development has been the identification by certain
elements within the police and other agencies of speciﬁc South Asian women as
spokespersons on the horrors of ‘backward, traditional practices’ in South
Asian communities; among these is Jasvinder Sanghera, who has herself faced
forced marriage and others from her organisation Kama Nirvana. Sanghera, who has been
rewarded with a CBE, has for years been a campaigner for the criminalisation of
forced marriage. She has been joined by right-wing think tanks and by a few
other individuals and groups from BME women's organisations who also support
the new law, among them the Iranian and
Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation and the Freedom Charity.

These spokespersons serve to validate in 'authentic' South Asian,
often Muslim voices, the racist and specifically Islamophobic discourses
endlessly regurgitated in one form or another by the press - the salacious
stories in the tabloids of young women suffering and brutal parents destroying
their lives; and the variety of figures for the numbers of forced marriages and
honour crimes - 'there are thousands every year according to one "reliable
source", hundreds according to another', says Imkaan's Research and Policy
officer Sumanta Roy, 'they are figures based on a moral panic created by the
media with little information on how they were obtained, or even how forced
marriage is being understood by various state agencies in different parts of
the country'.

In fact the statutory agencies and police often still confuse
forced marriage and arranged marriage. As Zlakha Ahmed said
at a public meeting last year, there is a sheer lack of
interest in dealing with violence against BME women and children, except where
it can be ascribed to 'cultural' causes.

Culture has long been a stick to beat BME
communities with. As Letti Volp has written in her study
of forced and voluntary marriage among adolescents in the US, ' when the actors
involved are immigrants of color, we label behavior that we consider
problematic as "cultural," and understand this term to mark racial or
ethnic identity. Thus, we consider early marriage by a Mexican immigrant to
reflect "Mexican culture." In contrast, when a white person commits a
similar act, we view it as an isolated instance of aberrant behavior'.

Sadly, as neoliberalism tries to appropriate
aspects of feminism, some feminists too have fallen into this trap. Julie
Bindel for example has dismissed
opposition to the law as 'cultural relativism..the result of creeping
acceptance of Sharia'. This is a way of silencing a whole range of women and
groups who have spent much of their lives confronting women's oppression in
their communities.

Will the government take on board any of the criticisms of the law
which the BME women's movement against violence has made? They have been forced
to make some changes to the Anti-social Crime and Policing Bill, and in the
next few days, campaigning and lobbying over the forced marriage law will be
intense, so there is still a slender chance that this may happen. If it does
not, it will lead perhaps to that much needed debate among feminists which is
already taking place in the US about how violence against women can be
confronted in the context of a racist state intent on widespread
criminalisation.

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